Did you notice the odd thing about the two latest appointments to the upper ranks of the government? Both of the women appointed to secretarial posts were career civil servants, who were recruited to the administrative officer ranks in (coincidentally) 1989.
This is not quite the way these things were supposed to work. Before 2002 all secretaries – heads of bureaus, not word processors – were career civil servants who had worked their way up the bureaucratic pyramid.
In that year, then-chief executive Tung Chee-hwa introduced what was called the Principal Officials Accountability System, under which heads of bureaus would be appointed, not by the existing promotion mechanism from within the civil service, but instead by him, from outside it.
These people would fill the Executive Council (ExCo), which roughly corresponds to the Cabinet, in the US system, and would be answerable to the chief executive who appointed them. They would not be on civil service terms and their appointments would expire at the end of the chief executive’s term of office.
There was little public discussion before this brainwave was launched on us, so there remains a good deal of ambiguity about what it was intended to achieve. What you might call the “realist” interpretation was that Tung believed the traditional civil service was not responding to his wishes and instructions as enthusiastically as he might wish.
There may have been something in this. Tung’s background as the patriarch of a family shipping company was perhaps a poor preparation for dealing with civil servants who were used to being given a task and then being left to sort out the implementation by themselves.
The “idealist” interpretation was that the new system would subject the administration of Hong Kong to more critical appraisal and monitoring. The new secretaries would be ostensibly political creatures who could deal with the Legislative Council (LegCo), explain the policies they were pursuing in public, and could be dismissed if they erred.
Even in its earliest incarnation this system did not live up to expectations, whether realist or idealistic. Having an obedient ExCo did not help Tung’s problems in government, and three years later he resigned with diplomatic health problems.
The new secretaries proved not unlike their predecessors. Even in the first batch there were five civil servants. The government’s relations with LegCo became more contentious as it aligned itself explicitly with the DAB and Civic Party against the others.
“Accountability” did not ensue. The chief executive was reluctant to admit an appointment was a mistake and appointees were reluctant to resign. Secretaries who had committed egregious blunders were hounded from office by public opinion, more or less as they always had been.
In 2008 the system was renamed and extended by the next chief executive, Donald Tsang. Under the new Political Appointments System, the existing secretaries were reinforced with undersecretaries and assistants.
Launching the innovation, the then-secretary for constitutional and mainland stuff said the existing secretaries would continue to study and design government policies in conjunction with the permanent secretary (senior mainstream civil servant) of their bureaus. The new deputies would liaise with legislators and provide policy input. The assistants would help bureau chiefs to reach out to the community.
Officials also said the new system would preserve a “permanent, professional and politically neutral civil service,” while nurturing talent which would be needed for the introduction of universal suffrage, then considered a likely future prospect.
The two new layers of appointees, with the associated fleets of drivers and personal secretaries, would cost HK$60 million a year.
Which brings us to the outstanding question. Now that this scheme has demonstrably failed, and many of the objectives which motivated it have been abandoned, would it not be a good idea to save a lot of money by abandoning the whole thing?
The system has not succeeded in introducing a wave of talented outsiders to the top of the administration. There are now 15 secretaries, of whom nine are career civil servants. Three of the others came from government-funded hospital or school backgrounds and one is an apparatchik of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, the pro-government simulated trade union. There are only two genuine outsiders.
Since we no longer aspire to political pluralism, the idea of a politically neutral civil service has become meaningless, and indeed civil servants are no longer expected, according to the latest version of their code, to be impartial and objective. Chief executives have many problems, but passive resistance from the civil service is clearly not one of them.
The system has not nurtured any conspicuous political talents, and indeed the selectors now appear to prefer to seek candidates for office in the upper ranks of the police. There is no need for an extensive herd of specialists to liaise with LegCo, which is expected to do as it is told, as indeed is the general public.
In these straitened times the Political Appointment System is, at best, an unaffordable luxury. At worst, an expensive attempt to put lipstick on a political pig?
Type of Story: Opinion
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data.
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